Behind the Scenes Minis: Food Saftey and Kitties

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. We talked about food safety and how a whole framework for food safety came from the Space program. Yeah, I had not realized how involved Pillsbury was this, which is like significantly involved. Yeah. There, So there were several companies that were involved in one way or another with making food for the space program, but like when it came to the development of hass A, Pillsbury is the one that was the biggest player. Um there. Work on things like microbiology and controlling microbial stuff was also connected to their being able to sell shelf stable dough for people to cook at him, so they like there was stuff about their business that made sense as a potential partner for NASA to send stuff into space. We didn't get until a lot about the crumblinus factor of the food because that was fairly easily solved and also not really related to the food safety aspect of it. But like, I hadn't really thought about the part of like if you send a protein bar into space, it's gonna live through a whole lot of vibrations and jostl ng and stuff during the like the liftoff and all of that, and then, Uh, they weren't really sure, like how is how it a crumbly bar type thing? Would it just come apart in zero gravity? Like we need to make sure that we don't wind up with little bits of food stuck in the instrument panels? Um, And I it had not entirely occurred to me that, like anybody would kind of say, is this food just gonna come apart at the seams in outer space? Um? Do you remember a while back, I think maybe before we were doing this show, when you were site director for House to works it and I was the tech editor us getting into a discussion about a paper on fractals and food safety and how I think there had been maybe an NPR piece about the space program and them talking about food safety and specifically one of the astronauts really wanted because they'll take astronaut requests of like what food would you love to have, and they'll try to make a space safe version, and one of the astronauts had wanted barbecue, and like how tricky that was? And I think I ended up pitching an article on fractals because of it. That's cool. We did, and it was many moons ago, so I would not expect you to remember it. But I always think about it when I eat barbecue now, which I don't do very often, but sometimes I do love barbecue. There have been some interesting papers on that, um yeah, like fractal analysis and food structure and just too in case anybody doesn't see the connection there, right, Like fractals measure these repeating patterns in in anything, but when applied to food, you're thinking about things like surface area, because the more surface area food has, the more points it has where it can become somehow a growth point for something lucky that you don't want in your person. And so something like barbecue, even if you have like a clump of it, say the size of a golf ball, because of all the little ridges of pieces sticking out, it has tons more surface area than that same clump of golf ball if it's like a clean scoop of mashed potatoes. Um. So that's had a big discussion about it many yea, literally probably twelve and a half years, maybe maybe longer. So long yeah, yeah, Um. I grew up in a household where there was always a focus on food safety. Um, Like, we grew pretty much all of our vegetables, and there was a whole like freezing, canning, drying process and all summering into the fall to like preserve all of this food. And there was like just a lot of my mom being very careful to can things in a way to prevent us from getting botul is um from it, like that kind of stuff. Um. And then when we were kids, my brother got salmonilla um not from something he ate. Um. We we pinpointed the likely cause as a turtle that he was playing with in the creek behind my parents or my grandparents house, and then like not thoroughly enough washing his hands afterward before we ate, and none of the rest of the family guid it. It was only my brother. Uh. And after that, Uh, potential sources of salmonella were like lockdown. Yeah. Like previously, like even with their just being a lot of focus on making things, making sure things were cooked thoroughly and the like their correct steps to can things, we were allowed to do things like lick the beaters after the cake got mixed. Um, But that was no longer. No more of the licking the beaters after at At the time, my mom's thought process was the egg because eggs are a potential source of salmonilla flower actually as a thing that in more recent years people have become aware of different things that can contaminate flour. We've said this a little bit in the show, but like so many of the big outbreaks now have nothing to do with with meat or chicken or eggs or the things that people have thought of as like the big sources of of food boarn illness for a long time, it's cantle open spinach and vegan crumbles. I have a question for you, because I know you are, I would rate you as very keenly aware at all times about food safety in a way that like I'm a little more cavalier. Which is it to say that I'm like, yeah, dirt great, But I just I recognize that there are things I cannot control, and so part of me is like, I'm not going to get too hung up on this, because yeah, I wake up with a cat sitting on my face half the time. Like I can't get too precious about certain things. But I do wonder what your position is on flips, by which I mean, in case anybody doesn't know, a cocktail made with a whole egg in it. Yeah, I don't drink them very often just because the texture of them is a little uh not my favorite. But I am less concerned about them because, as I understand it, the alcohol in them makes it a little bit safe. Right. And there's a lot of stuff that to me is like a like a risk analysis, right. Like I do eat sushi even though sushi is a higher risk food because I like get it from restaurants where I trust that they're taking the appropriate precautions and buying sushi grade fish and uh and that kind of thing. But like I also if I get a burger in a restaurant, I always order the burger medium well because that's like the most safe temperature. And that was the case where all of us in the two years of my career that we that I wrote about food safety. For my job, uh, I worked in this creative department of this company that sold cleaning and sanitation supplies. So all of our whole jobs was about like cleaning, product labeling and writing and designing newsletters to send to restaurants and grocery stores about keeping things clean and sanitary. And so when all of us went out to eat as a group. Often somebody was like checking ahead of time on the website to be like, what is the sanitation grade of the restaurant, And then all of us always were ordering our burgers medium. Well. Um, it's one of those things where you know, is it two decades later almost? Uh, It's like it's I'm probably more likely to get food poisoning from the salad from the burger because requirements on on the meat handling are have become a lot strict and in some ways like the produce has lagged behind a little bit. I am a rare meat eater, like I'm that person that loves a blue steak. Oh steak is different to me because it's the exterior of the steak that's the bigger risk when you get all the ground meat ground up together. That's also love a rare burger, but I I upgraded to medium rare because it made Brian so nervous all the time. Also, just for clarity on the flip thing, in case anybody doesn't know, a flip involves a whole egg and some sweetener. Usually it's different than if you get a drink made with egg white foam, which is the white, and those are usually concerned. Like I know people that will do an egg white drink and will not do a flip because they get just the whole leg makes them a little more nervous. Just in case anyone was like, wait, I don't but what am I doing? Yeah? Usually a little oh I love a little knak flip boom. That's a great way to spend your evening. Um, I do. I just they're easy to make, They're really beautiful. I know some bars have switched over to doing pasteurized egg white like the prepackaged. You have to shake those a lot harder though, to get the level of froth that you would get from if you just separated a fresh egg yourself. Big thing. Sorry, I'm always talking about cocktails. I often laugh and I at you cringe when you see like on social media. Uh, there will be those like threads going around about you know, when you walk into a restaurant where they kind of yell at you and their food safety grade is like a sea that it's going to be the best meal of your life, and that is often very delicious, It's true. But I also am keenly aware of their safety grades and restaurants. Yeah, yeah, also not a perfect system. But also I you know, if I walk into a place in the grades of Sea, I'm like, eikes, I'm probably leaving unless there's no other option, right. See. I know you don't watch Bob's Burgers, but there's a whole health inspector through line on that show, yeah, that you might find hilarious. Um. There was a restaurant when I was living in Atlanta. I know what this is. I think, Oh, I don't know if you do. Um. It was a place that I had eaten a lot, and that it was like they're their rest they're grades were always you know, pretty good, pretty good, pretty good, and then they like straight up failed a health inspection. Um and I and then after that it was like hi a every time. And I was like, I actually have more confidence in that restaurant because somebody messed up and they fixed the problem and now it's a priority. Is that without naming names because I don't want to, was that a sushi place? It was, Okay, it was exactly what I was thinking about. Um. Yes, I remember that being very scandalous because it was a sushi place. Everyone I think that we both knew would like that was one of the favorite sushi place. Yeah. Uh, and then they had it was like dramatic the way that thing rippled through Atlanta because a lot of people love to eat there, right, And like you said, whatever it was, they were either having a really awful day or had like a really awful you know one thing, or like an employee that was not being careful. Yeah, and then that was not the case anymore ever again. Yeah. Yeah, and when it comes to a raw thing like sushi, like I like feeling safe eating it, knowing that I'm taking a risk by eating it. Yeah. I also didn't realize how recent a lot of these regulations and laws and guidelines were. Yeah, right, Like at one point, we're talking about like a piece of legislation. I'm like, I got married that year. That's not that far back yet. Well, and I like I remember the when the Jack in the Box outbreak happened, And it wasn't the only big outbreak connected to like a restaurant chain that happened right around that time, but like it was a big deal. That was Like I was in college at that point, I did not live anywhere near where the outbreak was actually happening. But like even in the we did not have social media. We only kind of had the Internet. We had all her about the outbreak like it was a whole big thing, and people were very upset, Like because people want to be able to eat food that doesn't make them sick, right or worse? Yeah, yeah, because that strain of equal I can indeed kill people. It's it's very dangerous. Also, this is why I trust no soup. Yeah, I don't eat soup almost ever. I will occasionally myself make a creamy chowder when I'm craving it, but that's it. I don't normally I'll never order it in a restaurant, not a soup go. Yeah, it's the thing that I think about a lot occasionally. Patrick and I have been traveling somewhere, um and I'll be like, oh, I think I'll get the sushi, And I'm like, why why would you eat in an unknown to us sushi restaurant while we are on a trip at like an airport like this? That is like not not the risk that I am okay with taking. But you know, ordering it from the restaurant where we eat at all the time, that's different. It was exactly travel where my beloved said to me, please stop ordering your burgers as rare as you'll go, as you'll go. And he was like, this makes me nervous when we travel, because if you're sick, we're in rough shape. It's that's fair. Fair. Yeah, a lot of my stuff is also making sure as much as possible that anything I make for someone else is not going to make them sick. That's like the time I become the most anal retentive about cleanliness and safety. I will ever be right. If I'm like sauteing some stuff for myself, I'm a little more sloppy geloppy. But if it's like someone else is coming or I'm baking for no, forget it. I become really really like put the cats away. My cats don't go on the counters, but just in walking around the house, they're sure a little fuzz, you know, hair cat hair gets in the air. No, we we sequester them. We air vacuum the whole area. My cats are not supposed to be on the counters, but I sure do. You sometimes hear the sound of a cat jumping down from something in the vicinity of the kitchen. I think I can count on one hand the number of times our current crop has ever been on the counter, and now they're all old enough that they're like too high. They don't want to jump up there. Yeah. Now folks know so much about our food practices and cats, my distrust of soup. On the show this week, we talked about Louie Wayne and Louis Wayne's cat pictures. Did I love all of them? I love the cat pictures. I love the realistic cats. I love the cats and human clothes. I love the vivid landscapes that some people thought were like not as good quality as this earlier work. I think they're great. I love the kaleidoscope cats. Of course, in any person's artwork that spans through the late nine and early twentieth century, there's stuff that's very dated or inventative by today's standards. With that caveat boy, I just like spent a lot of time looking at Louis Wayne. I love the the one that I think it's just called the Cat's Birthday Party, and it's a bunch of cats holding champagne coops and they all look so happy and they're wearing little collars like human um, you know, like a shirt collar. I love that one. Yeah. Yeah. At one point we were talking and I was trying to madly write down some notes because the Madam Tabby project that he worked on and that story. It wasn't until we had read this outline and I was I wasn't familiar with that work. But it wasn't until we were saying the words that I was like, this sounds a lot like the plot of the Studio Ghibli film That Can't Returns, which has some significant differences. But I really think that had to have been an influence on that film, which is quite lovely. And there is a King of Cats, which is pretty great. Who is this giant fat rolling version? Um, But that plot is not so different in terms of being allowed to go to the Kingdom of Cats. Yeah, and what that means. I've seen that movie. It's been a very long time. I love it. One of the things about Louis Wayne is that, uh, it's tricky to pin down information specifically about his life. Um. There is one biography that I know of that was written in the sixties that I had to get an out of print copy from a university art library to be able to read it for this um and and so like getting specific detail and stuff is hard. Um. And as with many things. The specific detail may indeed exists somewhere in the UK in somebody's attic or an archive or you know, old hospital records or whatever, but like I just don't have access to them. But so much of his life has become, i think, not necessarily by his own doing, just embellished to make it be more about cats um or embellished to kind of romanticize the idea of like his mental state. One of the things that I didn't really get into is there is a newspaper article about him that was published in the US that's just got a bunch of stuff in it that is totally made up, And it has this whole section about which hand he was using to draw with, and the writer implies that he was drawing he was drawing like negative subjects with his left hand, like he would draw the bad cants with the left hand and the good cants with the right hand. Like oh, no, agreed, all good and all good and terrible is how I feel. Sometimes, Yes, oh, I always say like, uh, rest of peace. Mr Birds was the best worst cat I ever knew. Right, he was terrible, and I adored him. I will often say of mine, you are so good and so bad um so anyway, like there's this stuff that's completely made up that seems to be part of the Louis Wayne mythology. Also, I, when I started working on this, mentally pronounced his name as Lewis because it is spelled l o u i S. And as a person living in the United States, everybody that I have noon whose name is spelled l o u i S has pronounced it Louis. And if they went by Louis, that was like a nickname spelled l o u i e. Um. Right, It's one of those things where someone goes by Louis, people will be like, is someone in your family cajun kidding? It happens in the South all the time. And so that's and that's the thing, like if somebody had French ancestry, or if we were like saying an anglicized version of a French name, I would l o u i S would be Louis. It never I never realized that a lot of people um in the UK have the name spelled l o u i S pronounced as though it is spelled l o u i E. And I had that dawning revelation while trying to confirm after having watched that movie that came out which is streaming on I think Amazon Prime here. Um, having watched that movie and been like, they just called him Louis the whole time? Was that his nickname? And I like went down this whole rabbit hole and was like, oh no, a lot of people in the UK spell their name like this and pronounced it this way, and that I just I don't know, I never maybe because I'm not like a British Royal family aficionado. Um, because there are also Louise in the British royal family who has spelled Louis and pronounced Louie. Well the thing too in the US, right, if you're gonna go by Louie, often that S is replaced with an E. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, That's what I'm saying. So like we just would never like there are two different names in the US. That's what I'm saying pretty clearly, there are two different names. Yeah, we have people like Louis Armstrong that's usually spelled with an S. But then I'm like in my head that Louie was a nickname and like Louis was his full name. I don't it's the whole this is my whole weird rap pool. When I was down in this episode, I looked at cat pictures and I thought about how to say Louie or Louis Now. I have always wondered, because, um, I have had like a passing knowledge of him, you know, not somebody I had studied a lot. But it always struck me as odd that people would talk about the per aggression of his art style and the stuff he was doing that was a little more experimental, as so surprising and unusual a development in his later life. Um one, because part of me is like all artists experiment and evolved. But that's that's one thing. But the other is have these people never looked at his ceramics because those cats are freaky deaky looking. They're I mean, like they're really cool. But they don't look like his early illustrations either. They look completely cubist and geometric and really really they have a very I don't know any way to describe them other than saying they have a very specific style that could be aligned with many other art styles, but they don't look like the cute ceramic kitty figurines you might be thinking of at all. No, and apparently so they apparently they are very rare, which does kind of suggest that maybe there was a shipment of them that got destroyed, but no record of what ship they might have been on. Relatively recently, like within the last ten or twenty years, there was a sudden influx of them showing up at auction, to the point that people were like, I think these have to be counterfeit, Like this is too many of these two have suddenly showed up on the market. Anyway, I think they're great. They're very fun, They're very futurist. Mm hmm. I'm also thinking of there's one of his pieces. I don't know what it's called. I have seen it listed as like the Cat's Nightmare or something like that, you know what I'm talking about, where it's a kitty in bed and there are a million owls on the bed just just staring at the cat. Yeah. I love that. What Yeah, yeah, kitties. This has been like sitting around on my uh on my to do list for a while as Louis Louie Wayne's cat pictures, like not just the person, but also like these pictures, so many pictures of cats, yeah, tons of them. I associate them with the place where I first saw them, which was cat shows. So I think about them in that very specific, wonderful and odd environment where everyone knows who Louis Wayne is, of course, and it gives me delight. Yeah. Um, because he didn't copyright any Even if he had copyrighted all of his art at this point, most of it would probably be in the public domain in most places. So there's a ton of it online that you can just look at if you just google Louis Wayne. A lot of the stuff that's gonna come up first is going to be the kaleidoscope cats from later in his life, just because there spent so much writing on them. But just there's lots and lots of them to look at. Um. And so says Friday, if your weekend's coming up, maybe you can spend your weekend doing a deep dive and the cat pictures. That sounds great. It's not your weekend and you want to look at some cat pictures. I hope you can find a minute to do it. Um. We will be back for the Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have a brand new episode on Monday, and if you haven't, you can subscribe to our show on the I Heart radio app, or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.